I have a website for a small electrical contractor company. I want to put all the areas this company will service at the bottom of the webpage (to improve google search results).

ie: washington d.c., fairfax, herndon, chantilly, arlington, and so on

Will google find a way to penalize me for doing this?

Possibly; I don't know enough about Google. But a lot of site s do that for less than legitimate reasons. You'd be better off to get the city or county names in the anchor text of links pointing to your site.

What do you mean Kyle ?
Just throw them at the bottom loose, without any connection to your document text ?

Why don't you try to incorporate them in the text like this:
We service the washington d.c., fairfax, herndon, chantilly, arlington, and so on ....

Can also repeat them in the contact page

And can also try to put them in h1 tags in a natural way


I would also do some link exchanges (or paid links) using anchors like this:
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and fairfax
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and herndon
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and chantilly
(in other words vary your anchor text and include all your keywords in a meaningfull way)

Originally Posted by Noobstein

I have a website for a small electrical contractor company. I want to put all the areas this company will service at the bottom of the webpage (to improve google search results).

ie: washington d.c., fairfax, herndon, chantilly, arlington, and so on

Will google find a way to penalize me for doing this?

No, but the real visitors probably will.


the best way is to use them in a way that makes sense to REAL people as outlined by xprmnt. Funnily enough, the search engines also find this to be a "good thing" as well.

Originally Posted by xprmnt

What do you mean Kyle ?
Just throw them at the bottom loose, without any connection to your document text ?

yeah

Why don't you try to incorporate them in the text like this:
We service the washington d.c., fairfax, herndon, chantilly, arlington, and so on ....

Why would i want to make the user sift through that? I can just put it at the bottom of the page where it will be less intrusive to what we really have to say.

I would also do some link exchanges (or paid links) using anchors like this:
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and fairfax
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and herndon
Electrical contractor in Washington d.c. and chantilly
(in other words vary your anchor text and include all your keywords in a meaningfull way)

thanks, i'll try to do this

OK, if you think that incorporating them in the text will be intrusive, I guess you can make a small section on the contact page that says "We offer services in such and such areas"

And thinking about it twice I guess you can also put them in the footer and even in the title of some (even all pages)

In the title of the main page for example I would say:
Company name, Electrical contractor servicing the areas of Washington DC ...
I would put it also on the footer

as long as you don't drop in there all the counties of united states, it wont be considered spam by google

cool, thanks